Give Your BLEBot a New Name

At the Hackster Hardware Meetup Seattle, we had a bunch of BLE Bot 9000 robots. The problem was that all of the bots exposed the same services and names, so you can’t choose the robot you want to control. The solution to controlling your bot is to give it a unique name, so that when you scan for devices you only connect to your device. This tutorial covers how to change the name of your BLE Bot 9000, and how to to connect to a bot by name.

The first thing we need to do is install the Firmata library:

Step 1. Start up your Arduino IDE. If you need to install the IDE, you can find the download here: Arduino IDE.

Step 3. Change the FIRMATA_BLE_LOCAL_NAME value from “FIRMATA” to the name you want to use (on my computer this was line 27). NOTE: The new name must be 8 characters or less. In this example I use “MYBOT“.

#define FIRMATA_BLE_LOCAL_NAME "MYBOT"

Step 4. Save your updated bleConfig.h file. (Make sure you overwrite the existing file. Windows will try to save in a different folder if you aren’t running as Admin, since the file is in the “c:\program files (x86)” folder.)